Pulse 2.0: Little Bits of Betterness

Since we initially announced Pulse 2.0 four odd months ago, most of our new feature work has naturally been poured in to Pulse 2.1 (currently in early access). This doesn’t mean, however, that Pulse 2.0 has been standing still. On the contrary, as feedback comes in from customers we continue to tweak — mostly by the addition of minor fixes and features that each make life with Pulse a little better.

Enough improvements have piled up that I thought it would be worthwhile to round up the more important ones, especially for the sake of existing customers wondering what the latest versions can offer. Even the smallest features (implementation-wise) can have a big impact, depending on your usage pattern. Here it goes…

Reworked dashboard and browse views: both of these views have been rewritten to be more dynamic, and they now allow you to save the collapsed state of groups using a simple toolbar.

Greater dashboard configurability: more control over which groups and projects are shown in which order on your dashboard.

Links from configuration pages to reports: you could always jump quickly to a project or agent’s configuration, now you can jump back easily too.

Better log time-stamping: a stamp on every line of output for easier diagnosis of build issues.

Option to run hooks for personal builds: you can now choose on a per-hook basis whether the hook should be run for personal builds.

Import support for pulse files: manage complex pulse files by breaking them down into import-able pieces.

Trigger-specific properties: you can pass values through to your build depending on how it was triggered, including remote API triggers.

Support for new Trac versions: updates to Trac integration for compatibility with the latest Trac release.

Support for Boost.Test: a new plugin to integrate test results from the popular Boost C++ library.

Support for skipped test cases: test reporting now understands that tests may be skipped and displays them accordingly.

Improved Perforce integration: including better client management, building at a label, and support for ticket authentication.

We hope these features make Pulse just that little bit nicer to work with, and look forward to delivering some even bigger features in 2.1. If you want a slice of the action, download the latest Pulse release now!